media

Marketing merchandise.

/ lizziechantree / 5 Comments

Happy new week everyone. This week I’ve been working on some new merchandise for my blog tour and launch. I had this brilliant photo taken for me and it’s a wonderful way to spread the word for my work and make people smile. I have also made promotional keyrings and had posters printed. The theme of my book content and colour scheme follows through all of it, so that it is easily recognisable. This is a good idea, as it refers to your work and hopefully encourages people to pick up your book and give it a try. You never know who you might meet whilst wandering round, as my promotional photo shows, so take every opportunity and make the marketing fun for you and your readers.

 

When you bump into Batman and he’s reading your book! 🙂

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SEO tips for your website.

/ lizziechantree / 16 Comments

Lizzie Chantree SEO Tips.jpg

Welcome to my blog. Today I thought I’d share 3 quick ideas about how you can improve the SEO on your website or blog. SEO is important as in ensures the visibility of your website and helps your content discoverability by search engines. This means that if someone puts a word in the search engine to find a topic, that your page is higher on the list than other peoples pages.

1.  You need SEO to provide clear navigation for the search engines to find your site. Make your articles relevant to your page and don’t veer too far off of subject. Too many terms on one site become confusing and don’t rank your site.

2 .  Write content that will keep visitors on your page and use internal links to interest them enough to stay on your site for longer. If they enjoy one article, they may like another you have written.

3.  Don’t load too many photos onto one page or have too much content. If a page is slow to load, people will rapidly click off of the page and find another website with quick loading times. Always name photos what they are and not pic 1,2,3,5, or 5! The picture for this article is called Lizzie Chantree SEO tips.

 

View Lizzie’s Books Here: Click link.

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Link backs and SEO.

/ lizziechantree / 13 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Welcome to another Monday Marketing post. I hope you’ve had a relaxing weekend and are ready for a brand new week?

Today’s topic is link backs and raising the SEO rankings of your blog or website. I recently discovered that a great way to generate more views on your site is to add internal links.

  1. Write an article or post with original content. Google notices if content is the same somewhere else on the web.
  2. Add internal links within your post. This is a great way to create more page views within one article. People often only stay on a page for a few minutes, but may click links to other related topics if highlighted in the post and stay on your website or blog for longer, which in turn will boost your SEO and make your site more visible. I have added links in this post for you to see what I mean. Click the highlighted text and you will be taken to other articles on my blog.
  3. How to add an internal link in WordPress: Highlight the word in your text that you would like to make an internal link, then click the insert link button in your control panel. Open a new tab/webpage in your browser and open a different page on your website that is relevant to the keyword you have highlighted and copy the link. For example: The word marketing in one of my posts, could be part of the current post, but could also lead you to another post i’ve written on the topic, which you might also enjoy. Then paste that link from the browser into the insert link box in the article you are writing. Check the open in another page box to ensure a new window opens with the alternative page, then click, add link. This will make your chosen word into a live internal link.

Monday Marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 8 Comments

This week I’m going to tell you about visibility and loading times for a WordPress website. Most of my Monday Marketing tips are ones I’ve discovered on my journey as an author, but I have been in the retail and wholesale business for over 20 years and studied design, marketing and advertising at college and university, so the #3QuickTips may be helpful to other businesses too.

Lizzie Chantree blog. WordPress

 

1.  Some wordpress themes contain code that slows them down. Some of the content you add can also slow the site down. By visiting a site called GTMetrix.com and typing in your site address, you will be shown a report on how well your site is loading for users.  Ideally you want an A or B rating.

2.  You will be shown Page speed, YSlow, Timeline and History tabs. Click on these to be shown elements of your site and how they preform. Here you can check if the theme of your site is slowing it down. If the theme is causing problems, then you might want to think about changing the theme.

3. Creating fresh content for your blog or website is a great way to make it load quicker. If text is copied from the internet, it can have hidden links and code inside from the originator which shows search engines that it’s not new and should be ignored.

 

Writing news!

/ lizziechantree / 26 Comments

I have some great news to share with you all. I have just signed my first book contract! I am thrilled to join the team at Crooked Cat Publishers and can’t wait to see my latest book, Ninja School Mum, in print in early 2018.

newspaper-Lizzie Chantree

I am very lucky to have been offered other book contracts over the years, from wonderful publishers, but this is the right one for me. As soon as I have more news about the exact date of my new book release, I will let you all know. Thank you for your continuing support of my writing journey and for popping by, as it’s very much appreciated. Writing can be an isolating process, but with all of the fabulous authors and readers I have met since I wrote my first book, Babe Driven, it feels like there is such a wealth of support out there. #Total #Stars 

Believe in yourself. Be you.

/ lizziechantree / 18 Comments

believe in yourself

I love this photo. It can be easy to doubt yourself as a writer, but learning to believe in yourself and be who you are, can help tremendously. Here are a few ideas to bring inner confidence.

Do something that you love.

If you can find small pockets of time during the week to do something that you love, this will bring more confidence, as you will feel happier on the inside.

 

Stop procrastinating.

Don’t keep putting off getting things done. Task left unfinished will just drag your mood down.

 

Put on a happy face.

Research has shown that smiling makes us feel happier, even if we don’t fully commit to it. Try smiling a few times during the day when you wouldn’t normally and see if it lifts your mood.

 

Celebrate your achievements.

Pat yourself on the back for even the smallest achievement. If you did something well, feel proud of what you have done.

 

Be kind to others.

This is something that makes everyone feel good. Kindness to others is not something everyone can achieve.

 

Getting active.

Moving your muscles every so often increases oxygen flow to the body and helps your mind to focus. You won’t have time to doubt yourself when you are on the move.

 

Throw away any negative thoughts.

You don’t need them. Bin them!

 

Be you 🙂 

Relaxing view

 

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 5 Comments

Here are today’s 3 quick marketing tips for authors.

 

Babe Driven Twitter Ad

 

Most authors struggle to find high numbers of reviews for their work, but things always seemed a little easier to me when you can gift a book to a reviewer in America, but this is not yet available in the UK via Amazon. This is what I’ve discovered about gifting books:

1. When you gift someone a book, they might not download it. They can use the price of the book to buy something else.

2. Most authors drop the price of their book before gifting it, so that the gifting process costs them less.

3. You can’t gift a book during a freebie run. There would be no point anyway, as the reviewer could download it for nothing as long as you had the book free in every country. Free book promotions are often planned months ahead so you would have to plan both events together.

 

Author Branding

/ lizziechantree / 20 Comments

Branding

I’ve been reading quite a bit about author branding lately and the topic really fascinates me. I have run my own businesses for years, which is why my romance novels are focused around entrepreneurs, but I remember back to my first business logo and how awful it was! I was 17 and my first business was called Juniper Berry. The logo was quite unimaginative with a tree in a brown square box with some text underneath.

When I invented my first product, I was attending The School of Communication Arts in London and had begun to learn about product design and branding. We were set tasks to design new branding and packaging for some big companies as a project and the results were anything from funny shaped boxes to business cards made from a jigsaw! It did make me realise how important the identity is to a product and as authors, our books are our product and we are brand ambassadors.

When someone looks for your book or product, can they easily identify that they are from you? Can they read the label clearly, even from a phone screen or iPad? Does your branding follow through across all of your novels, or does it confuse your readers? This might sound obvious, but when you look at a selection of work from some authors, its not always easy to see which ones belong together.

I often identify my favourite author’s books online by their book covers. I know their style and expect their latest covers, merchandise or social media to be uniform. My books are all romances about various businesses and their quirky owners, but they are still very different. One is a sizzling beach read, one a romantic mystery novel and one is full of magic. Here are my covers:

 

Even though they are different, I always use similar colour palettes and type faces. My author picture and social media branding is the same on all platforms:

Vector illustration of a portable modern tablet pc e-book reader.

I understand that it might seem strange to think of writing books as a business, but we are making a product that we really hope others will love and packaging it in a way that appeals to those people is vitally important.

I’m in the process of designing bookmarks and have asked some of my readers what they would like to see on them. Most would like the cover design work followed through, as they enjoy bookmarks that match the books they are currently reading. Again, this is all branding and a wonderful way to connect with our amazing readers. I’ll let you see the finished design when they are done, but I will be listening to my readers and carrying through my brand design.